Various services now provide voice and non-voice access to Internet data. A caller may access a “Voice Portal” or “Voice Site” by simply dialing a number advertised by the company providing the Voice Access service. The caller will hear a greeting that requests the caller to “speak” or “enter” specific commands. As an example, a caller may ask the system to provide him/her with the latest weather information by simply speaking a command, or pressing a DTMF button on the phone. The information provided to the user may be pre-recorded and accessed from a database, or it may be accessed from a page similar to those available on the Internet. The mark-up language used to code the page may be VoiceXML or any other type of XML-based coding language. Some legacy systems may use proprietary or less commonly used methods for connecting the system to back-end data servers.
A dropped call occurs when a call session is disconnected before completion. The reason for session loss can be due to an undesired interruption or by intentional abandonment. The problem is that there are no existing ways to return to the call session that was terminated before completion. Users have to begin new sessions and repeat the steps that they had performed earlier in order to follow a prematurely terminated session through to completion. As an example, a caller is making a purchase on his phone, he selects the merchandise, speaks the shipping and billing address, and then loses the call prior to completing his purchase. In all existing systems, the caller would need to repeat the afore-mentioned steps.